|
Getting your Trinity Audio player ready...
|
With too much going on this past week, I find myself without a solid, singular subject for my final column in print of 2025.
Grab bag it is!
December is just as busy a month at home as at work. My wife’s birthday is at the beginning and my son’s is toward the end – and four of his friends’ parties were in between. That’s on top of the usual overload that comes with the holiday season, which also has Christmas, New Year’s and two family birthdays in early January.
Just keeping our fingers crossed for cooperative weather for Francis’ party this weekend.
Workwise I’ve been entrenched since Thanksgiving preparing our Year in Review package on top of my normal workload – which unfortunately due to a deluge of breaking news hitting after-hours has also involved more story-writing than I really should be doing. What can I say? I’m a news-hound who just can’t ignore an important lead when I catch a whiff.
Shoutout to the Dublin and Livermore school districts for their respective news dumps last Friday afternoon and Friday night. Of course I say that tongue-in-cheek because they were actually very responsive to me on the weekend and I will never complain about having a good story … but cut a guy a break.
Compelled not to sit on the news over the weekend, I churned out what I think are the definitive articles on DUSD Superintendent Chris Funk’s retirement and LVJUSD’s tentative agreement with the teachers union after months of tense negotiations in private and in the court of public opinion.
Those stories just had to get out to our readers as quickly as possible – and we deserved the traction that came with those breaking headlines.
Headline-writing is the primary place where I get to flex my journalism muscles these days, other than picking up the odd story to supplement our coverage or putting out this here column.
After making sure each article is fair, accurate and contextual, ethically and legally, coming up with the right headline is the most important job of an editor. Cierra or I are often just tweaking the writer’s concept to make it pop more, but sometimes I’ll fully form it on my own.
Looking back through every Pleasanton Weekly paper from 2025, I was reminded that I published some pretty darn clever headlines.
Here are a few of my favorites: “Balancing the books” (about the impact on the library of Pleasanton’s city budget woes), “Mussel memory” (my column on my history covering the invasive bivalves), “50 years filled with laughter” (Balloon Platoon’s big anniversary) and “Put the supe back on” (PUSD turning to retiree Interim Superintendent Maurice Ghysels for the full job).
A fun exercise, if you’ll forgive the inside baseball, was our team coming up with the final headlines for our Downtown Series cover stories – the trick there being the online versions would start “Downtown Series:” and the print versions had the series logo right there, so we wanted to avoid using the actual word “downtown” as redundant. Thus, “Making it on Main Street” in Pleasanton’s case.
I’m proud of how our whole editorial group came together to produce an impressive series, highlighting the downtowns (or lack thereof) in Livermore, Pleasanton, Blackhawk, San Ramon, Sunol, Alamo, Dublin and Danville through interviews, research and photographs.
Our reporters took my vision for our 2025 editorial project and ran with it, even if it meant I had to put “Danville” on the cover of the Pleasanton Weekly. As important as each singular cover story was, our journalists also opened doors to ongoing coverage of those downtowns – like the two stories in this week’s paper about ShopConsciously converting to self-serve model in Pleasanton and Fratello’s closing in Livermore.
There’s no doubt what our team project will be in 2026. It’s election time, baby! Fun times…
Election stuff has already started for us, to be fair.
Some big news hit last month with Tri-Valley Congressman Eric Swalwell (D-Livermore) launching a campaign for governor of California.
And that’s about all I’ll say about that, lest my column be considered the type of forum that could get us in hot water for opining about anything candidate-related because as a journalism nonprofit, we cannot partake in potential “political engagement” that applies to published opinion-writing. (Our regular news coverage is unaffected by these IRS rules, as are paid advertisements.)
Same goes for the news a couple weeks ago that Pamela Price is running for Alameda County district attorney in 2026 to win the right to complete the term through 2028 that she was originally elected to in 2022 before voters removed her from office in 2024.
Nope, not touching that campaign with a 10-foot pole.
Speaking of trying not to enter the fray on Price, Alameda County officials put out a public statement about a week after Price’s announcement about election rules while not naming the recalled, former DA directly.
“The County of Alameda is committed to running fair and impartial elections that comply with all standards required by law,” officials stated. “The County applies California state law to determine local recall election processes. State law prohibits a recalled local elected official from being ‘appointed’ to fill the vacancy created by the recall but does not specifically prohibit the official from being ‘elected’ at a later date.”
“Running for elected office is a fundamental right protected by the First Amendment to the United States Constitution. The County of Alameda will not unilaterally abridge that right. As with any election, the outcome is for the electorate to decide, not for the County to pre-decide,” the county added.
Elections and beyond, 2026 will be an exciting year for news coverage in the Tri-Valley. Let’s get going.
Editor’s note: Jeremy Walsh is the associate publisher and editorial director for the Embarcadero Media Foundation’s East Bay Division. His “What a Week” column is a recurring feature in the Pleasanton Weekly, Livermore Vine and DanvilleSanRamon.com.
Ignoring transfer rules has forever changed high school athletics – and at what cost?December 16, 2025 11:03 am